Women's Life and Work in the Southern Colonies


Book Description

A seminal work exploring the daily life and status of southern women in colonial America, describes the domestic occupation, social life, education, and role in government of women of varied classes.




God, Guts, and Gallantry


Book Description

Major James Lide Coker of Hartsville, South Carolina was a gutsy man of God and an entrepreneurial genius who founded 20 successful businesses. He grew up in the Old South, but became one of the most forward-thinking leaders of the New South. His business odyssey alone makes a fascinating story, but his expansive heart and keen intellect reached well beyond commerce. He was a passionate leader of the Christian faith, a pace-setter in women’s education, and a progressive in race relations. Ahead of his times in every way, he concluded his own book on the Civil War with these words: “There is one great result of the war between the States for which we are truly thankful: slavery is abolished.” Though high-born, he and his family were brought low. In the Civil War, he bravely defended his homeland, fighting with Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in Virginia, where his brother was killed. In Tennessee, James’s left thigh was shattered at the Battle of Lookout Mountain, and he became a prisoner of war. Delirious with pain, he had several harrowing escapes from death before finally returning home to Sherman-devastated South Carolina. He had lost almost everything, including the use of a leg. But with extraordinary valor, he rose up with a crutch and a hoe to re-establish his farm, and went on to lead the economic, educational, and spiritual rebound of his region in a time of crisis and carpetbaggers. James became the wealthiest man in South Carolina, yet remained humble and down to earth. His war agonies and innate sensitivity to human need enabled him to identify with the harshest realities of the human condition and with the plight of the disenfranchised. When his ingenious and diligent post-war initiatives brought him rivers of prosperity, he let them flow through him to bless countless others in his rural state. A deeply spiritual man, Major Coker also faithfully taught the boys’ Sunday School for thirty-eight years. Today, we have too few leaders of genuine integrity. We need more like the Major – rock solid, gallant, far-sighted, and good to the core! For the benefit of present and future generations, his inspiring story, with fresh perspectives and previously unpublished material, is retold in Dr. Joslin’s unique style, blending biography, daring adventure, courageous faith, and the drama of American history.




South Carolina Baptists, 1670-1805


Book Description

Baptist Churches of South Carolina and list of Baptists.




The Cashaway Psalmody


Book Description

Singing master Durham Hills created The Cashaway Psalmody to give as a wedding present in 1770. A collection of tenor melody parts for 152 tunes and sixty-three texts, the Psalmody is the only surviving tunebook from the colonial-era South and one of the oldest sacred music manuscripts from the Carolinas. It is all the more remarkable for its sophistication: no similar document of the period matches Hills's level of musical expertise, reportorial reach, and calligraphic skill. Stephen A. Marini, discoverer of The Cashaway Psalmody, offers the fascinating story of the tunebook and its many meanings. From its musical, literary, and religious origins in England, he moves on to the life of Durham Hills; how Carolina communities used the book; and the Psalmody's significance in understanding how ritual song—transmitted via transatlantic music, lyrics, and sacred singing—shaped the era's development. Marini also uses close musical and textual analyses to provide a critical study that offers music historians and musicologists valuable insights on the Pslamody and its period. Meticulous in presentation and interdisciplinary in scope, The Cashaway Psalmody unlocks an important source for understanding life in the Lower South in the eighteenth century.




The McCown Family of the Peedee Section of South Carolina


Book Description

John McCown (1760-1818) married Sarah Cusack in 1789 and lived in what became Florence County, South Carolina. Descendants lived in South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, Washington, D.C., Washington, and elsewhere.




Unification of a Slave State


Book Description

This book describes the turbulent transformation of South Carolina from a colony rent by sectional conflict into a state dominated by the South's most unified and politically powerful planter leadership. Rachel Klein unravels the sources of conflict and growing unity, showing how a deep commitment to slavery enabled leaders from both low- and backcountry to define the terms of political and ideological compromise. The spread of cotton into the backcountry, often invoked as the reason for South Carolina's political unification, actually concluded a complex struggle for power and legitimacy. Beginning with the Regulator Uprising of the 1760s, Klein demonstrates how backcountry leaders both gained authority among yeoman constituents and assumed a powerful role within state government. By defining slavery as the natural extension of familial inequality, backcountry ministers strengthened the planter class. At the same time, evangelical religion, like the backcountry's dominant political language, expressed yet contained the persisting tensions between planters and yeomen. Klein weaves social, political, and religious history into a formidable account of planter class formation and southern frontier development.




In the Affairs of the World


Book Description

This book examines how, quite by accident and under very unfortunate circumstances, Britain's colony of South Carolina afforded women an unprecedented opportunity for economic autonomy. Though the colony prospered financially, throughout the colonial period the death rate remained alarmingly high, keeping the white population small. This demographic disruption allowed white women a degree of independence unknown to their peers in most of England's other mainland colonies, for, as heirs of their male relatives, an unusually large proportion of women controlled substantial amounts of real estate. Their economic independence went unchallenged by their male peers because these women never envisioned themselves as anything more than deputies for their husbands, fathers, brothers, and friends. As far as low country settlers were concerned, allowing women to assume the role of planter was necessary to the creation of a traditional, male-centered society in the colony. Fundamentally conservative, women in South Carolina worked to safeguard the patriarchal social order that the area's staggering mortality rate threatened to destroy. Critical to the perpetuation of English culture and patriarchal authority in South Carolina, female planters attended to the affairs of the world and helped to preserve English society in a wilderness setting.




Life in the Pee Dee


Book Description